I have managed learning management systems for over a decade. I have administered Cornerstone, evaluated Docebo, piloted Absorb, and consulted on half a dozen others. I have built courses, configured learning paths, pulled reports, and sat through more vendor demos than I care to count.
And I have come to believe that the LMS — as an industry category — is one of the most successful cases of mislabeling in enterprise software.
The Name Is the Problem
"Learning Management System." Three words, and the most important one is in the middle: management. Not learning. Management.
That is not a cynical observation. It is a design reality. The LMS was born from a specific need: organizations had compliance requirements they needed to track. Did this employee complete their annual harassment prevention training? Did that new hire finish their safety orientation? Can we produce a report for the auditor?
These are legitimate needs. But they are management needs, not learning needs. And when you design a system around management needs, you get a management tool — regardless of what you call it.
What Compliance Architecture Looks Like
Look at the core data model of any LMS. At its center, you will find three entities: a user, a course, and a completion record. Everything else is built on top of that foundation — enrollment rules, prerequisites, due dates, notifications, reports. The entire system is an elaborate answer to a simple question: did this person do this thing?
This architecture creates specific incentives. For the learner, the incentive is to reach the completion state as quickly as possible. Click through the slides. Skip to the quiz. Score above the threshold. Move on. The system literally rewards minimizing time spent learning.
For the administrator, the incentive is to maximize completion rates. Send reminder emails. Set due dates. Escalate non-completers. Report to leadership. The system rewards surveillance, not education.
For the content creator, the incentive is to produce trackable artifacts. Package everything as SCORM. Add knowledge checks that the LMS can score. Make courses short enough that people will actually complete them. The system rewards packaging, not pedagogy.
None of these incentives have anything to do with whether someone actually learned something or changed their behavior.
The Engagement Illusion
Modern LMS vendors have tried to address these limitations with "engagement features" — gamification badges, social learning feeds, AI-powered recommendations, and mobile-responsive players. On the surface, these look like learning improvements. Under the hood, they are engagement optimizations for the same compliance architecture.
A leaderboard does not make someone learn better. It makes them complete courses faster to climb the board. An AI recommendation does not deepen understanding. It surfaces the next thing to complete. A mobile app does not improve retention. It makes completion possible during a commute.
I am not arguing these features are worthless. They reduce friction, which matters. But they are lipstick on the fundamental problem: the system still defines success as completion, and every optimization is pointed at that metric.
What Actual Learning Architecture Looks Like
If you were designing a system for learning — not tracking — you would start from a completely different place.
You would start with the concept of a practice environment. A place where people can try things, make mistakes, and get feedback without consequences. Not a quiz that checks whether they absorbed information, but a sandbox where they can apply it. The system would track not whether they finished, but how their performance changed over time.
You would build around spaced repetition. Instead of a single course that marks as "complete," the system would resurface key concepts at expanding intervals — tomorrow, next week, next month — because that is how human memory actually works. A concept marked "complete" after one exposure is almost certainly forgotten within weeks.
You would integrate into the workflow. Instead of pulling people out of their job to sit in front of a separate application, the learning system would be embedded in the tools they actually use. A five-second tooltip at the moment of confusion is worth more than a thirty-minute course consumed three weeks earlier.
You would measure behavior change, not content consumption. Did the sales rep start using the new talk track? Did the support agent's resolution time improve? Did the customer configure the advanced feature they learned about? These are the outcomes that matter, and almost no LMS is designed to track them.
The Uncomfortable Middle Ground
So should organizations abandon their LMS? No. Compliance tracking is a real requirement, and the LMS handles it well. The problem is not the tool — it is the conflation of two fundamentally different objectives.
Tracking whether employees completed mandatory training is an operations problem. Helping people learn, grow, and change their behavior is an education problem. These require different systems, different metrics, and different design philosophies. When you try to solve both with the same tool, the operations problem always wins, because it has deadlines, auditors, and executive visibility.
The organizations that do learning well use their LMS for what it is good at — compliance, record-keeping, certification tracking — and build separate infrastructure for actual learning. They create practice environments, performance support tools, mentoring programs, and contextual help systems that exist alongside the LMS, not inside it.
Why This Matters Now
This distinction is becoming critical as the nature of work changes. When your product was simple and your workforce was stable, annual compliance training was a reasonable proxy for organizational readiness. But in an environment where products evolve monthly, where customer expectations shift continuously, and where AI is changing what it means to be proficient — a completion-based model cannot keep up.
The organizations that will thrive are the ones that build genuine learning infrastructure — systems designed to make people better at their jobs, not just to prove that training was delivered.
The LMS is not going away. But we need to stop pretending it is something it was never designed to be. Call it a compliance engine, a training records system, or a certification tracker. Just stop calling it a learning platform — and then build an actual learning platform alongside it.
